July 28, 2020

External Data: Strava

---

External data can give a boost to data-driven innovation. An interesting source is Strava, a fitness tracking app mainly centered around cycling and running. Through this app, individuals can show their activities to their friends and share it with the world. Trips marked as public can be retrieved through their global heatmap and external API. From these trips, we can derive interesting statistics.

We can compare and estimate for each country in the word how many people are cycling and running. This can be shown on a granular level, even within specific streets in cities. Next, we can compare the activities over time. The impact of corona is highly visible, some countries went into a complete lockdown and therefore no activities were shown at all. In other countries, the opposite effect was visible. When people were obliged to work from home, they found more time to ride their bike or go for a run.

The data mainly allows us to further improve our network analysis. The cycling and running activity contain rich information about certain areas or neighbourhoods. Besides, we will use the data when advising Pon OpCo’s in making strategic decisions.